Hey, I've got a radical idea

Microsoft already has a Mac BU (business unit) with Mac developers. Why don't they leverage this available wealth of talent to port Silverlight fully to MacOS X (and by extension, making it essentailly iPhone-ready)?

That would deny anyone the opportunity to say it's essentially Windows-only as a reason for not adopting it? (Moonlight exists for Linux but its feature set lags and is not as compatible or fully implemented as the Windows Silverlight is. My colleagues discovered this the hard way.)

Personally, I think some healthy (true) multi-platform competition is good. I'm not that fond of Microsoft, but they already have this talent in-house -- why not make use of it? Silly, radical idea, I know... :-)

Not so sure

I was just at an MS developer conference where they were plugging Silverlight like mad (along with sharepoint for some reason!)

It runs EVERYWHERE they said - well if you define everywhere to be Windows + MAC.

What about phones we asked = "we can't confirm anything but there may be some news in the next Windows mobile release"

So it might be available for the worlds worst selling phone platform.

WinForms and WPF is dead - Silverlight is the new desktop.

So can we open files? Yes - in my documents, if the user agrees to a whole bunch of scary security pop-ups.

And they now have it working in Chrome (mostly, and unofficially)

sylverlight on symbian

they need to make a version for the symbian OS too. My Setanta-i subscription uses silverlight, and Im unable to watch the games on my phone.

Ok for now but..

Whats the chances that some future revision of SL stipulates that the only browser that can run the product is IE <insert revision here> - vendors who used earliers version of SL would then be left with the painful decision of either redoing something in flash (if its still around by then) or being forced by MS to continue down the SL path and thereby inadvertantly also forcing their consumers to be browser specific.

Cool, a new way of making ugly calculator apps!

Thanks Microsoft!

MIssing the point

The place that Silverlight will truly shine is in business and enterprise applications.

Most coders who I know are software consultants and app developers for enterprise and finance apps and Silverlight is the hottest thing around right now. Nobody in the business community cares if its only on 45% of the desktops in the consumer world.

You ever try to write a reporting suite that pulls data from SQL with Flash? How much fun did you have? :)

'I had to fiddle with the registry to get this working'

Same old MS...

'Produce shit now - promise better later'

They've been doing the same since Word 3.0 - see

http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780887308550-0

Rarer than chicken lips

Has anybody *actually* visited a site that is using it? Microsoft sites don't count.

lies, damn lies and statistics

"Silverlight can only muster around 45 per cent according to Riastats.com - though that figure took a lurch upward last month, partly thanks to an increased sample size"

hmmm... does that mean the sample is now more representative, or that somehow you get a less accurate percentage by sampling more sites?

COM for Mac

Mary Jo Foley did say Microsoft is evaluating adding a COM like interface to Silverlight to Mac ... and btw Linux is no one operating system, it's atleast 5 distros which update themselves every 6 months, with different package managers, ...

Netflix

well i may be one of those .net devs they want to please, but until the netflix viewer works on linux/mono I'm not interested.

Not surprising really

I am not surprised in the slightest that Windows is getting the most attention? This was the point all along - produce a nominally cross-platform / cross-browser runtime, build up market share, and then slowly let the non-Windows platforms atrophy. Why is anyone surprised at all?

Microsoft are paying lip service to other platforms. Mono / Moonlight is just a running joke on the open source community. Moonlight is barely at version 2 and already Silverlight is at version 4. And of course development tools for Linux are awful. MS know the open source community will NEVER keep up with silverlight and will NEVER support their DRM / codecs properly and never compete with their tools so they let it live on as a token project that they can be mentioned when people raise the subject of cross-platform support.

Despite this there is no doubt that Silverlight is better architected than Flex (e.g. multi-threading), but I wonder why anyone wants to sacrifice a ubquitous solution for one which is trying to coral people into the Windows / MS domain. If Flex is not to people's liking then JavaFX would be a better long term solution although it has its own issues.